UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In the wake of a federal court recently ordering a town in Mississippi to desegregate its schools after a five-decade legal battle, a new book about civil rights and education is now available.

Erica Frankenberg, associate professor of education and demography and co-director of the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Penn State, and her colleagues recently published "School Integration Matters: Research-Based Strategies to Advance Equity."

According to Frankenberg, the book sheds light on how and why U.S. schools are experiencing increasing segregation more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated schooling inherently unequal. “It offers policy and programmatic alternatives for advancing equity from pre-kindergarten to higher education and describes the implications for students and more broadly for the nation,” she said.

A main argument of the book is that race has to be central in school reform conversations if we are to promote equity and access for all students, which runs counter to the prevailing colorblind argument – the belief that racial classifications by the government are prohibited.

The publication addresses topics such as the need to increase school integration to advance equity, the roots of persisting inequity in U.S. schools, current practices that adversely affect integration, the challenges and opportunities to advancing integration within higher education, and future directions and policy recommendations for pursuing integration for equity.

Other co-editors are Liliana M. Garces, assistant professor of higher education, co-director of the Center for Education and Civil Rights, and research associate for the Center of the Study of Higher Education at Penn State; and Megan Hopkins, assistant professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This work was supported in part by Penn State’s Population Research Institute, part of the Social Science Research Institute.